The present invention relates to the Internet. More particularly the present invention relates to navigation of web pages over the Internet.
The World Wide Web of the Internet is a significant contribution to the field of computing. In the web environment, user machines effect transactions with web servers using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). HTTP is a known application protocol that provides access to files (e.g., text, graphics, images, sound, video, etc.) on the web server.
A web page is a document created with HTML (HyperText Markup Language) that is part of a group of hypertext documents or resources available on the World Wide Web. Collectively, these documents and resources form what is known as a web site. A unique Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is assigned for presenting any webpage or resource on the internet. The URL is an address that specifies the location of a file on the Internet. A web page may have links to other files and servers on the Internet. Generally, the links are categorized as a menu. The menu includes a set of hypertext links to more details. The menu may direct the user to other web pages or files located within the server or at other servers. For example, the web pages of Business Week (www.businessweek.com) offer a menu that is placed horizontally at the top of the web page. The appearance, format and location of the menu may differ with every web page, and some times even with every web page within the same web site.
In addition, various web sites provide similar services over the Internet. For instance, web sites maintained by various basking institutions provide identical services. These services require the user to perform actions that are common among all these different web sites. For instance, actions such as “contact for customer services”, or “know your account summary”, etc. are commonly provided by various online banking web sites. However, the description of such common actions may not be identical across such web sites. For example, the home page for American Express has a link for performing the action of bill payment, with a description that says “Check and pay your bill”. This link is listed in a menu for “Small Businesses”. On the other hand, the home page for Citibank has a link for executing the same action of bill payment with the description “Bill Payment”. Moreover, this link has been listed in a drop-down menu under the title “look for a product or service”.
The content of services provided by various web sites is confidential. The confidential information includes personal messages, financial transactions made, balance available and the like. Access to this information is permitted through an authentication mechanism such as username and password; or by disclosing personal account details such as account number. Links to access such confidential information can be obtained for that user only after authentication information is provided.
In light of the above discussion, there is a need for a method and a system for automatically presenting a menu of links for accessing similar web pages on different web sites in a consistent, user-friendly manner to a user. Moreover, the method and the system should enable organizing and presenting access to a variety of web pages, such as statements, bills, payment confirmation, and the like. The method should also permit learning from the community of users about web pages most frequently accessed within a web site and presenting it to all users.